standard model

Autoline's John McElroy visits Sandy Munro's shop, where a Tesla Model 3 is being prepared for a teardown benchmarking study. Munro, with deep design and manufacturing experience, points out issues he dislikes about the car's build.

John Oliver's Last Week Tonight segment on standardized testing in American schools. It covers how tests drive school funding, the achievement gap, and the testing industry around companies like Pearson.

Yannic Kilcher explains how he trained a language model on three years of 4chan's /pol/ board and let it post on the site. He evaluates how good the model was and discusses the ethics and fallout.

Coffeezilla investigates the company behind the Rabbit R1 AI gadget, alleging a shady history as a crypto and NFT startup and questioning its large action model claims.

Doug DeMuro reviews the 2017 Chevy Bolt, which has a $37,500 base price and 238 miles of range. He looks at why it sells poorly next to the Tesla Model 3, noting its quirks and narrow seats.

Tom Scott writes a more honest VPN ad, with the sponsor's name redacted, and explains why the typical claims in VPN advertising are misleading. He notes the sponsor was not happy about it.

Dan Olson of Folding Ideas critiques Fortnite's monetization, arguing it uses manufactured discontent, such as shop design and skins, to push spending. The video dissects the psychological techniques behind the game's business model.

John Oliver's Last Week Tonight segment on civil asset forfeiture, the process by which police can seize property they suspect is tied to crime. It explains how the property itself is put on trial and how departments profit.

A first-day ride-along with an Amazon delivery driver using the Rivian electric delivery van. She covers the van's new technology, how it compares to the standard Ford Transit delivery vehicles, and quirks and issues she noticed on the job.

Innuendo Studios' Alt-Right Playbook episode, drawing on Corey Robin's The Reactionary Mind, argues that conservatism defends hierarchy and a shrinking in-group.

John Oliver's Last Week Tonight segment on the NCAA, arguing that the organization profits enormously from college athletes while insisting they remain unpaid amateurs. It covers the money in college sports, including big-school athletic spending, and the case for paying athletes.

Jonathan Blow's hour-long livestreamed response to a RustConf 2018 closing keynote about entity systems in Rust. He argues that index-based entity systems amount to manual memory management that sidesteps the borrow checker, and he talks about friction for game developers.

Egoraptor's Sequelitis compares Mega Man Classic and Mega Man X, analyzing how the games teach players through level design without explicit tutorials. It mixes comedy with design analysis.

Benn Jordan argues that Spotify's business model undermines the music it sells, using streaming payout figures and the economics for artists and labels.

Patrick Boyle examines why birth rates are falling in nearly every country and argues the standard explanations do not hold up. He presents data suggesting fewer couples forming is a major driver.

A short clip of Steve Jobs explaining why Xerox failed, arguing that product people lose out to sales and marketing people once a company becomes dominant.

A short clip, from 2003, of Noam Chomsky going through crimes of post-WW2 US presidents. He argues that they would be indictable under the Nuremberg principles.

Linus Tech Tips explains how Windows Modern Standby causes laptops to drain battery while asleep, arguing it makes Windows laptops hard to recommend compared to MacBooks.

A three-minute rant by Harlan Ellison, excerpted from the documentary Dreams with Sharp Teeth, on why creative professionals should always be paid for their work rather than work for free or 'exposure'.

Tony Heller argues that US thermometer data shows a century of cooling and that NOAA adjusts the record to produce a warming trend.

Louis Rossmann, an independent repair technician, explains why he thinks Apple's soldered-in SSDs are a poor design. He covers failure modes and repair difficulty on MacBook logic boards.

A Vox Strikethrough video arguing that CNN models its political coverage on sports shows like First Take, pitting pundits against each other. It claims this favors drama over truth and degrades public understanding.

Tom Gally, a former professional translator and University of Tokyo professor, discusses in April 2023 how GPT-4 and similar models may affect translators' careers. He draws on Japanese-English translation experience.

Thunderf00t critiques the MIT and Berkeley metal-organic framework device that claims to pull water from air using only solar heating. He argues the energy accounting does not work and that such devices are essentially fancy dehumidifiers.

A Y Combinator video on vibe coding, the term Andrej Karpathy coined for letting LLMs write code. It reports what YC founders say about debugging, models and how much of their code is AI-written.

Thunderf00t argues that Zero Mass Water's solar-powered atmospheric water generator is essentially a dehumidifier with solar panels. He critiques its economics and physics, especially in arid places.